Distributed Tracing (Deep Workflow)

Traces answer which hop consumed time and where errors surfaced across services. Success requires consistent propagation, meaningful spans, and sampling that preserves signal without bankrupting storage.

When to Offer This Workflow

Trigger conditions:

• Microservices “unknown latency” between A and B
• Adopting OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, Zipkin, X-Ray, Cloud Trace
• Need service map and dependency insights
• High cardinality or cost concerns from traces

Initial offer:

Use six stages: (1) define goals & SLOs, (2) instrumentation plan, (3) propagation & context, (4) sampling strategy, (5) analysis workflows, (6) governance & cost. Confirm languages and infra (K8s, service mesh).